I don't know how English councils work, in Scotland many of our councils have just set their budgets which means that little bits of unspent money on other budgets suddenly becomes available. A big pot of unspent budget at this time of year is often that allocated to road gritting, which this year has been significantly underspent because our cold spells have been so short (in some years, of course, that budget pot may run out before the end of winter if there's a really prolonged spell of extreme cold and/or multiple periods of heavy snow), and because that doesn't even need to be transferred to a different department some pot hole filling is a natural thing to spend that on. What councils find difficult to find is a regular budget to spend on road maintenance, so we get a lot of patch and mend with the equivalent of loose change but very little work over the summer completely replacing large sections of road surface that keep the roads pot hole free for several years.
I could definitely buy that as the reason for the recent works here.
It’s a running joke round here that you always get loads of roadworks happening in February/March because if the department don’t spend all their funding for this financial year then they won’t get allocated as much in the next one. I guess it feels different this year because they were actually necessary roadworks.
We all know there isn't the money, because if there was money in council budgets then councils would be spending it on fixing more pot holes
Loads of potholes round here have recently been fixed, even though many of them only opened up when we had that really cold spell back in January.
I’d never thought my council was one of the rich ones before.
Heavily dependent on the local social care budget I suspect - and in addition to the budgetary reasons Alan notes I suspect they timetable their repairs for spring (once there's less risk of adverse weather)
Doubt it. It's as Alan said, we're getting towards the end of the financial year and any money not spent on gritting (we had a mild winter here) can be reallocated to running repairs. If it's not spent by the end of the year the roads department are likely to get (even) less money next year.
It would be far more efficient to resurface roads before they're so badly damaged the holes start appearing, but nobody does routine maintenance now...
Our Reform county council has been given loads of money by the East Midlands mayor to fix pot holes but claim it isn’t enough. They are also trialling a machine from JCB that they claim will sort everything out. The previous Tory administration, who also didn't appear to do much about fixing the problem, say it won't as they looked at the idea and it wasn't up to scratch. Whether or not the fact that the owner of JCB supports Reform has anything to do with the council getting the machine I couldn't possibly comment on.
They need to be truthful about their use of the word membership. No one who pays is a member of Reform. They are subscribers. They have no say in how the party is run. No vote, the party runs on the word of Nigel. He alone has the power to say what the party stands for.
As a point of information, there has been some central government funding deployed towards potholes but across the board the dearth of funding goes back to the Premiership of Boris Johnson.
Councils had to make the decision as to whether to fill in potholes or fund essential social services.
Those Reform councillors who are now complaining that there are insufficient funds are only finding out the hard way what councillors from other parties and none have been wrestling with for some considerable time.
I think a lot of Reform councillors believed Farage when he said councils were wasting people's money. When they got into power they realised how false that was.
This story shows there is a certain amount of regret of voting them in round here Councillors row at Pothole Protest.
One would think that if you were hoping to be a councillor one would actually do some research. Farage openly lied. I won’t hear anyone say otherwise. He must have known he truth.
I think during last year's local government elections some people stood for Reform, sure that they were just paper candidates. One for a ward round here lasted ten days before he resigned. Our local Labour candidate had pointed out on Facebook how much actual work he'd be expected to do, and I'm sure that was behind his decision to cut his losses and bow out/
I think during last year's local government elections some people stood for Reform, sure that they were just paper candidates.
I think that the evidence for that is quite convincing. Reform did better last year than they expected, and ran into a whole load of problems as a result (this includes what appears to be inadequate vetting of paper candidates, presumably on the basis of who cares about people not elected?, and various elected candidates who were unable to take up their seats or stood down very quickly when they realised they'd got themselves a more than full time job on a relatively low salary). Presumably they've learnt and this year will be fielding candidates who have been properly vetted, including being informed of what would be required of them if elected, and in all but the most anti-Reform seats knowing that there's a chance of being elected (one of the issues with a new party is that they won't have data on where their support actually is, or even much of an idea of the demographics of their support, and when presenting themselves as a protest party support can be very ephemeral ... that means that they could do well in unexpected places, and do badly in others where they might expect to do well - especially if it's known they might do well and tactical voting gets organised - and almost any candidate could be elected even if in the end very few are).
As many of you know, I'm active in the Scottish Greens, and we're looking towards the council elections next year (even while putting effort into campaigning for the Parliamentary elections in less than 2 months), and facing the prospect that as a party that's surging in popularity that we no longer really know what wards will be good for us, or rather know where we should be able to get a councillor elected but also that there's a significant number of wards where just the surge in support could put a candidate over the line without even actively campaigning there. That means we need three groups of candidates - those we hope should be elected and there will be active campaigning, paper candidates who we will need to advise that we think they could be elected even without campaigning, and paper candidates who we would be very surprised are elected. We also have an issue that Reform probably don't care about, that of trying to increase diversity of elected representatives which means we need to look at that second group of candidates to try and have as diverse a group as possible (that's much easier with the smaller first group, just from the point of view of number of people) - not helped, of course, by not being able to use any formal gender balancing process as that's possibly illegal following the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act last year.
My husband was having an on-line discussion with a friend about Reform's policies and thought he' better actually see what they say. I find them all rather alarming not least because of the lack of actual detail. https://www.reformparty.uk/policies#policies-section
My husband was having an on-line discussion with a friend about Reform's policies and thought he' better actually see what they say. I find them all rather alarming not least because of the lack of actual detail. https://www.reformparty.uk/policies#policies-section
Those policies aren’t relevant to the elections in May 2026, which are for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, local councils in England and Mayoral elections.
The Reform Party policies are at the central government level, which to some degree explains their poor performance in local governments in England. That and a lack of experience and the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Comments
Loads of potholes round here have recently been fixed, even though many of them only opened up when we had that really cold spell back in January.
I’d never thought my council was one of the rich ones before.
It’s a running joke round here that you always get loads of roadworks happening in February/March because if the department don’t spend all their funding for this financial year then they won’t get allocated as much in the next one. I guess it feels different this year because they were actually necessary roadworks.
Heavily dependent on the local social care budget I suspect - and in addition to the budgetary reasons Alan notes I suspect they timetable their repairs for spring (once there's less risk of adverse weather)
It would be far more efficient to resurface roads before they're so badly damaged the holes start appearing, but nobody does routine maintenance now...
https://theconversation.com/late-deciders-higher-turnout-what-the-gorton-and-denton-byelection-taught-us-about-voters-277268
About how Reform are coming unstuck in by-elections as voters mobilise successfully against them (and dont see Labour as the opposition they want)
It seems to be especially women voters who are doing this.
Councils had to make the decision as to whether to fill in potholes or fund essential social services.
Those Reform councillors who are now complaining that there are insufficient funds are only finding out the hard way what councillors from other parties and none have been wrestling with for some considerable time.
How to get a quart from a pint pot.
This story shows there is a certain amount of regret of voting them in round here Councillors row at Pothole Protest.
As many of you know, I'm active in the Scottish Greens, and we're looking towards the council elections next year (even while putting effort into campaigning for the Parliamentary elections in less than 2 months), and facing the prospect that as a party that's surging in popularity that we no longer really know what wards will be good for us, or rather know where we should be able to get a councillor elected but also that there's a significant number of wards where just the surge in support could put a candidate over the line without even actively campaigning there. That means we need three groups of candidates - those we hope should be elected and there will be active campaigning, paper candidates who we will need to advise that we think they could be elected even without campaigning, and paper candidates who we would be very surprised are elected. We also have an issue that Reform probably don't care about, that of trying to increase diversity of elected representatives which means we need to look at that second group of candidates to try and have as diverse a group as possible (that's much easier with the smaller first group, just from the point of view of number of people) - not helped, of course, by not being able to use any formal gender balancing process as that's possibly illegal following the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act last year.
https://www.reformparty.uk/policies#policies-section
Those policies aren’t relevant to the elections in May 2026, which are for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, local councils in England and Mayoral elections.
The Reform Party policies are at the central government level, which to some degree explains their poor performance in local governments in England. That and a lack of experience and the Dunning-Kruger effect.